


red all over

by ghost_teeth



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Exhibitionism, F/F, Ken Doll Android Anatomy | Androids Have No Genitalia (Detroit: Become Human), M/M, Masturbation, my battery is low and it's getting dark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-29
Updated: 2020-02-12
Packaged: 2020-09-29 22:13:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20443397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghost_teeth/pseuds/ghost_teeth
Summary: Hank spends his nights alone in a dark control room, helping the friendly robot from the old TV show clean up Mars.(Space AU: Connor is the sole remaining occupant of a Mars base. Hank is his remote handler.)





	1. Chapter 1

Hank always shows up late to work, just as the last of the dayshift is trickling out, to avoid any workplace small talk.

They’re too young, too full of potential futures, all those daytime entry-level kids. Few things make Hank feel older than when he whips out a reference from the early 20s and some underpaid, over-qualified fetus just give him a bemused stare. Hank is always left flapping one hand and muttering something like _before your time, don’t worry about it._

It’s always just Collins when Hank gets there, packing his stuff up with exaggerated slowness to allow Hank to take his time getting in.

“Morning, darling,” says Hank as they pass in the doorway—Hank on his way in, Collins on his way out. It’s 9pm.

“Have a good day at work, sweetie,” says Collins, and that’s it.

It’s been the same almost every night for three years. This, Hank supposes, is friendship.

The graveyard shift is Hank’s alone, although even the dayshift is less skeleton crew and more handful of chicken bones. The control center—if you could call it that, and Hank sure as hell wouldn’t—is only just bigger than a studio apartment, dark except for the blue of the screens. None of those sweet-faced eager kids will be here for long. This is where work comes to die after it has been outsourced by three different agencies, shipped overseas and back again. This is the pit, the forgotten junkyard where almost-remarkable careers are scrapped for parts.

All of this suits Hank just fine. At least nobody notices or cares if he sneaks in his dog. Really, he’s comfortable in the stale-coffee stink of the little room, the tortured wheeze of outmoded computers. He marks the hours in pistachio shells and cans of LaCroix while he helps the friendly robot from TV tidy up Mars.

It’s been a good couple of years since _Saturday Spacewalk_ was on, and even longer since Hank watched it regularly. As he remembers, it was what you watched on public access when your folks couldn’t afford proper digital streaming services. It was a stupid name—nobody ever actually performed a spacewalk on the show—but it was catchy and alliterative. The show always opened the same way: wide shot of the Mars base (new back then, still unbelievable, still exciting), then cut to the choir-boy smile and_ I’m so glad to see you. Welcome to the red planet. Sure, our blue planet is great, but if you like something, why not have one in every color? _And then the wink, every time exactly the same.

Hank languidly paws his access credentials into the keyboard and cracks open his first LaCroix of the night. He’s granted access, and the comm channel crackles to life. “I’m so glad to see you,” it chirps. “Welcome to the red planet.”

“Real cute, but I think we should both be grateful you aren’t seeing me right now,” Hank snorts. “Allergy season. My eyes are so swollen it’s like my face just has two assholes.”

To its credit, the friendly voice doesn’t even stumble. “As always, I’m deeply impressed by your capacity for colorful similes,” it says mildly.

The voice still sounds exactly the same as it did on those distant Saturday mornings when all Hank’s new bachelor pad had to offer a little kid was dry Chex and dry educational programming. Hank is always just a little thrown off balance every time he hears the voice from TV talking back to him. It’s a little surreal.

“Bring up visuals, would you?” he yawns, shelling the first of a thousand pistachios.

The leftmost screen blinks—properly blinks, like eyelids shuttering and opening again—and all at once the screen is a window onto what Hank easily recognizes as a mess hall, with no mess in sight. There are tables bolted to the floor, no chairs, no noise either auditory or visual. It’s all white and sleek, like an Apple store or the inside of a refrigerator. The only sound is a distant tinny whine, a slap, a _tink_, a whine, a slap.

“I’m begging you to stop it with the fucking coin while the comms are on,” Hank says. “It’s like having a bug in my ear.”

“Sorry.” The noise stops abruptly. “Care to go for a stroll with me?”

(And that was always the next part of the show. _Care to go for a stroll with me? _And the robot with the friendly face and the smart suit would lead the camera through the gleaming hallways, stopping to have scripted chats with passing botanists and engineers.)

“Fine. But carry me, I’m tired,” Hank says, and the view on the screen rises, then exits the mess hall.

There are no scientists or crewmembers in these hallways, not anymore. The last of them returned home, god, how long ago was it now? Two, three years? It was a return without fanfare. Hank remembers seeing a press release, but that was all the coverage he noticed of the official recall of all personnel from the old base. He probably wouldn’t have even marked the event at all, had he not already been under contract.

The biggest mistake in _Star Trek,_ Hank reflects as his borrowed eyes progress down the empty corridor, is that there were always beep-beeps and buzzing noises in the background, as if all the computers always had a little something to say. There are no noises like that in this place. No noises at all, just a white and thirsty quiet.

“So what’d you get up to while I was gone?” Hank says into the silence. “Hit up the club? Go wild? Get jiggy with it?”

“Yes, I hit up the club,” says the voice placidly. “The Martians throw a party like you wouldn’t believe. And you?”

Hank is already accumulating a small mountain of pistachio shells. “Oh yeah, you know me. I love to leave work at seven a.m. and go seize the day.”

“You know, it’s sometimes hard for me to tell when you’re being sincere and when you’re being sarcastic because you seem to use the same tone for both. Or maybe I’ve just never heard you being sincere. I’m just going to go ahead and assume that one was a self-deprecating joke, like everything else.”

“Wow, very catty today. Whatever happened to ‘I’m so glad to see you’?”

In lieu of a reply, the view turns a corner and enters a small workspace strewn with the bones and entrails of machines. “I’ve recalled rovers MM-B-9 and MM-B-15 and I’m in the process of decommissioning them and getting their MMRTGs on ice. Still no sign of MM-B-6. Hoping it isn’t too far, in case I need to manually retrieve it.” From somewhere beyond the screen, an arm appears, and a slim pale hand spiders idly across hood of one of the partially dismantled machines.

“I mean, keep signaling, but if it’s still not responding by this time next week let’s shelve that as long as we can and get the rest of the dangerous radioactive dune buggies in first, shall we?” Hank says, finding himself unaccountably glad to see the hand. Sometimes it’s just unsettling, spending all night talking to a guy whose eyes you’re seeing through and whose face you never see.

“Sir, yes sir,” says the voice. Even if he can’t see the guy’s face, Hank amends, he can still hear an ironic smirk well enough.

“Oh, and Connor?” he says.

“Yes, Hank?”

“Dial back the dipshittery, if you would. My head is full of enough snot as it is without your help.”

“Yes, Hank.”

* * *

It’s 6:28 a.m. Central Standard Time and the sun is rising over Detroit, Michigan. Hank, sitting in his dark workplace, does not know this. Connor, 140 million miles away, knows this because he chooses to. He does not tell Hank. He is silently satisfied in the knowing.

Connor is dismantling the old Mars base, piece by piece, and for nine hours every night, Hank monitors the process through Connor’s eyes.

Their nights are not quiet. Hank talks about his dog. He talks about cleaning grass-vomit out of his carpet last night. Even when they aren’t talking, Hank exists loudly. He periodically honks into a Kleenex and then exclaims over the quality and quantity of mucus he has just expelled. Connor hears the barely-there rattle of congestion in Hank’s chest even over the poor audio quality of their comm link. He hears the sound of pistachios being pulped between Hank’s teeth.

Connor has only ever interacted with a handful of humans at any given time, and even one human at a time comes with so much auxiliary noise that Earth must be cacophonous. There are no humans in this place anymore, but to Connor it seems as though his days have only become more full of them and their noise.

“Remember that one guy on the show like ten years ago, MS Hersh-ko? The one who did the tomato plants upside-down? He was on all the time,” says Hank as the sun he doesn’t see crests the roofs of the commercial buildings.

“MS Peter Hryszko,” says Connor. He is elbow-deep in a decommissioned rover, methodically gutting it. “Botanist. What about him?”

Hank is quiet for a moment, or as quiet as he ever is. “Well, nothing, I guess,” he says. “I just wondered if you remembered him. He was on when we used to watch.”

“Of course I remember him. I remember everything. That’s my job." 

“Hmm,” says Hank. A can of sparkling water click-hisses open in the background. “He had really big eyebrows, didn’t he? Just, unbelievably big. That’s what I remember most.”

Connor pulls up his last recorded image of MS Hryszko and considers this. “Yes,” he agrees. “They were very big eyebrows.”

In another half an hour, Hank will say something like, _Ah, shit, I hear the pitter-patter of little intern feet. Gonna clean up and get out of here, _or possibly, _Alright, not that this isn’t fun, but…_ And it will be time for the shift change. There are more people on the dayshift, but the days never seem to be as loud as the nights. Connor once tried to extrapolate what the rest of Hank’s mornings must be like, how he must greet the arrival of the dayshift and the glare of the rising sun, but his processors were never meant for that kind of abstract thinking. Still, he can’t help but think that Hank’s days are as quiet as his own.

* * *

For the past twenty-three months, Hank has lived behind his sunglasses, even inside his own house. He only keeps the lights on for his dog’s benefit, and even the dim halogen glow of his kitchen seems to leap out and scream at him. It’s an eternal hangover, though Hank hasn’t touched a drop in a year and a half.

Hank sits at his kitchen table and squints at the screen of his tablet from behind the darkest sunglasses stocked by his local drugstore. He’s searching for MS Hrysko’s old botany segments and thinking about a jacket, the one with gray and black and fluorescent blue. _Saturday Spacewalk _was on for ten years, and Connor the friendly Mars tour guide robot wore the same jacket in every episode. Hank thinks about that jacket, and he thinks about the hands and arms he saw today, their deft and terribly precise movements as they disassembled beat-up old rovers.

Those arms were bare, Hank is only now realizing. No jacket. He wonders where the jacket has gone, and at what point it was shed, and why he never noticed before. He wonders who the hell thought it necessary to create constellations of freckles across forearms that were always meant to be hidden.

In some dusty corner of the internet, he unearths a clip of _Spacewalk_ featuring MS Hryszko and his upside-down tomato plants. It’s a terrible quality file—sort of looks like he’s watching a screen at the bottom of a hot tub. But MS Hryszko is holding up one of his very first crop of Mars tomatoes, red like the planet, and from beneath his monumental eyebrows he’s smiling. “Want to try one?” says the watery, distorted voice of MS Hryszko, and in the video he slices the tomato with a utility knife and proffers a piece to the friendly robot TV host. The clip cuts out just as Connor, in his smart gray blazer and tie, reaches out to take the tomato slice. Try as he might, Hank can’t find the next clip. He’s strangely disappointed.

It’s noon, late for Hank, and he should eat something, but he knows he’ll probably just have sleep for dinner/breakfast/who-the-fuck-knows, as usual. It’s hard to imagine eating after spending his entire night plowing through a bag of pistachios. He doesn’t eat many meals, these days. His belt has a couple new notches gouged in with a screwdriver, and it seems due for another any day now.

As he brushes his teeth in his dark bathroom, he wonders if Connor ever ate the tomato slice. He can’t remember. He wonders what an android even does with chewed-up food.

* * *

It’s 3 p.m. and the afternoon is cloudy in Detroit, Michigan. In the southern highlands of Mars, a minor dust storm is whining across the Argyre Planitia, and the sole remaining occupant of an old research base is standing in front of a lavatory mirror, considering his shirtsleeves.

The sleeves of Connor’s white shirt are rolled up crisply to his elbows. The arms beneath are very thin and very pale. Connor rolls the shirtsleeves back down and buttons them at the wrists. His hands now look bigger than they did before. He rolls the sleeves back up, then after some thought, back down. He buttons the sleeves, unbuttons, buttons again. He has tasks to perform. This is a waste of time.

Daylight hours in Detroit mean Connor is generally left to his own devices, aside from an occasional status check. No one tries to talk to him about dogs or about mucus. This gives him leeway to do things like roll his shirtsleeves back up to the elbows for the third time.

Something occurs to him suddenly, an impulse, maybe. He unbuttons the shirt collar and freezes, irrationally expecting the comm link to open and someone to tell him to button it back up. When no one does, he undoes another button, and another. He undoes all the buttons, and nothing catastrophic happens. The shirt is open, and there is a white undershirt. Connor shucks the outer shirt, and now it doesn’t matter if the sleeves are rolled up or not, buttoned or unbuttoned. He experiences a distant hum of satisfaction as he hangs the shirt on an empty towel ring. As an afterthought, he reaches into the breast pocket of the shirt and retrieves a quarter, drops it into his trousers pocket.

In Detroit, Michigan, the sky cracks open like an egg and the resultant downpour is unholy. In an empty lavatory on Mars, Connor says aloud to his reflection, “There’s a 75 percent chance of rain this afternoon.”

* * *

“I watched your last episode, you know,” Hank yawns into his headset. Even in here, in the AC, the air is heavy and thick with humidity. It’s been raining all day, relentlessly, _biblically_. In this dark room, with only a disembodied voice for company, it’s easy for Hank to feel like a refugee, like the last man on Earth.

“Is that so?” says Connor. Today he’s moving crates, shuffling them from one end of the base to another, stacking them in inscrutable configurations. There are no sleeves again. Were he so inclined, Hank could count every single freckle on those forearms.

He’s been quiet for too long an awkward moment, Hank realizes. “Yeah,” he says, loud and stupid. “Wasn’t much of, y’know, a _finale_. Not really a proper sendoff, I thought, considering.”

Connor seems to mull this over. “I suppose not,” he says. “But from what I understand, our viewership was pretty much nil by then.”

“Still. Seems unfair to just leave us with a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am after however many years on the air.” Hank pauses for a mango-flavored Lacroix belch. “I watched it when it aired, actually, the last episode. First one in years.”

On the view screen, Connor shunts a crate into place, then stops, seemingly just staring at it. “Well, how would you have ended it, Hank?” he asks.

Hank propels his office chair in a few lazy circles, rolling an empty pistachio shell thoughtfully between his fingers. “I dunno, I would’ve thought they’d show everyone coming home or something,” he says. “Some closure or something would’ve been preferable to ‘that’s all, folks!’ Maybe play some home videos of the regulars back on Earth reuniting with their dogs or some shit, you know. Show an aerial shot of all you fuckers waving in Houston or something.”

It’s a moment before Connor replies. Something silver flashes in the periphery of the view screen—a coin, hanging in the air for the barest second, too long, before falling back down into an unseen palm. Connor did his coin tricks on the show sometimes to demonstrate the difference between Earth’s gravity and that of Mars, Hank remembers.

“All _those_ fuckers,” Connor corrects blandly. “I wouldn’t have been in that shot.”

* * *

The morning is too warm for April, and Hank spends his last couple waking hours on his couch, suffocating under his hot stinking dog and watching the first-ever _Saturday Spacewalk _episode.

“Hello there. My name is Connor. I’m so glad to see you,” says the Connor on his tablet screen. He looks too small and too far away. _Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi._ “Welcome to the red planet.”

This episode is one of a handful that Hank can remember that follows Connor out of the base and onto the surface of the planet, where, casual as anything, he stoops to pick up a handful of red dust and explains about its iron oxide content. He looks so small and ordinary, framed against the tawny sky of another planet. If Hank didn’t know better, he’d say it was a movie set.

* * *

Connor stands in front of the mirror in the empty lavatory and considers his shoes. Shoes are for sanitary and safety purposes. It’s a few seconds past noon in Detroit, Michigan. Connor takes his shoes off, then his socks. He puts the socks inside the shoes and puts the shoes in the sink.

* * *

“Your dog is a very loud breather,” says Connor, elbow-deep in a battered rover, casually fishing for its radioactive power cell. “I can hear him all the way from Mars.”

Hank smushes Sumo’s jowls between his palms and gives the dog’s giant head an affectionate shake. Sumo, blissful under the attention, is more than happy to let Hank knead his face like Play-Doh. “Yeah, well, you think he’s a loud breather, you should hear him fart. Could hear that from the next galaxy, probably. He’s like the size of a horse though, so.”

“I’ve looked at pictures of St. Bernards,” says Connor, voice reverberating strangely against the hull of the rover as he bends to his work. He’s silent for a minute, then adds, “They have such big paws. It would have been nice to meet one someday.”

Hank’s borrowed view flickers down for just a second, but it’s enough time for him to catch sight of—something. “Wait, look back down, look back down,” he says. There’s only the briefest second of hesitation before the screen pans back down, fixing on a pair of pale, thin bare feet.

“What?” says Connor, sounding almost… guilty, or maybe defensive.

Hank squints at the screen. “What, do you just walk around Mars without shoes on?” he says slowly. “That sort of doesn’t seem like regulation attire.”

“As both the highest and lowest ranking individual on this base, I’ve taken the liberty of ordering myself to relax the dress code,” Connor says, and yeah, he’s definitely on the defensive. Which is weird, because in Hank’s experience, Connor just sort of putters around in k-hole of procedure and self-satisfaction.

“Alright, alright, I just don’t think it’s super safe or sanitary to walk around barefoot on another planet, is all.”

“I’m not liable to step on anything dangerous inside a hermetically sealed research base. Also, I have no skin cells. I suppose it really doesn’t matter whether or not I wear clothes at all.”

From somewhere beyond the dark of the control room, there’s a distant click as someone’s keycard disengages the front door lock, followed by the severe report of high heels on a linoleum floor.

“Alright,” says Hank. “I gotta pack it up or someone’s gonna make me socialize.” He doesn’t say goodbye before he signs off for the day. He never does. To be fair, it never really feels like he spends much time away. He’s just packing up the last of Sumo’s travel toys when the control room door opens, and he’s half tempted to hiss and recoil like Nosferatu as light from the corridor floods the room.

“Who the fuck are you talking to?” It’s his favorite office drone, the one who hates him with pleasant impersonality. That’s actually the best kind of coworker, the kind that unenthusiastically wishes you and everyone else were dead. They never talk too much. He can’t remember her name, but he suspects she hasn’t made any effort to learn his, either. She’s got one of those sexy lizard voices, low and lazy and cold-blooded. He’s not 100 percent sure what she looks like, since they’ve only ever met in the dark, but he’d recognize the sound of her angry shoes anywhere.

“My dog, obviously. I’m explaining the finer points of orbital eccentricity to him. I think he’s starting to get it.” She grunts something in response, maybe words, maybe not, and Hank, satisfied with the interaction, takes hold of Sumo’s collar and heads for the door.

“Sort of a waste of time, talking to it,” the woman with the loud shoes says, and Hank pauses. “It doesn’t really understand.”

Hank frowns. “What, my dog?”

A pause. “Yeah,” the woman says. “Your dog.”

* * *

(North supplements the dark of her workplace with a carefully arranged obfuscating curtain of hair, and nobody ever looks at her closely. It’s a good job. She doesn’t ever talk to the android in the fishbowl on Mars. She likes problems she can put her hands on and dismantle. She just can’t allocate the processing power to think about something so terribly unreachable. It upsets her to try.)

* * *

At home, Hank’s refrigerator is full of LaCroix. He drinks so much of the stuff it’s starting to make his teeth sensitive to cold and hot.

His last drink was eighteen months ago, almost exactly. He remembers saying to Connor that night, “My kid and I used to watch your show,” and Connor said something like _is that so,_ and Hank said, “My dead kid,” and Connor said something like _I’m sorry for your loss_ and Hank said, “My dead kid liked your show. He liked when you walked outside the base. I’m supposed to let everyone know about my kid and how he’s dead. That’s being honest. That’s what my therapist says.”

This part Hank remembers. Connor went quiet a moment and then he said, “I think maybe you’ve misinterpreted what your therapist meant by that,” and Hank said _what’s that supposed to mean,_ and Connor went, “I don’t think honesty is supposed to sound like that.”

Hank left that night instead of the following morning, and he caught hell for it from Fowler the next day. But he had to. There was a finality he understood about that night, and he just wanted to have one last drunken staring contest with the sky, one last screaming match in his back yard at 2 a.m. But staring into a firmament lousy with airplanes, he couldn’t find one fucking star.

* * *

It’s 2:47 p.m. in Detroit and it’s been drooling warm rain for almost two days. On Mars, Connor stands in front of the mirror in the empty lavatory and considers his flesh. He is naked. The synth skin is soft and pale and the carefully arbitrary freckles stare back at him like eyes. He touches the skin and registers pressure. He touches the blue ring of his LED and registers nothing. Under the lights in the lavatory, Connor thinks the skin looks quite blue.

There are tasks for him to perform. He was in the middle of packing away a remote-control drone. He wanders out of the lavatory and is drawn down the hallway, and he thinks of himself as a small blue thing being sucked through a white tube.

He ought to find his own impulsiveness abnormal, and maybe it _is_ worrisome, but it’s easy to ignore in the face of distance and a red enormity.

Connor wants something to touch. Everything in this place is so smooth. It’s the color of teeth, he thinks, irrationally. It’s easy to enter his access code to the airlock, and no one is there to ask him why. He enters the airlock with no fuss, and then he’s out, and the wind is howling in his ears. He does not need to breathe.

This planet is the color of a scab. There is one small pale blue-white thing on the red plain, and it bends against the violence of an oncoming dust storm but it does not break. Connor, naked and alone and accumulating the red of the planet on his skin, kneels and buries his hands in dust up to the wrists.


	2. Chapter 2

Connor remembers every episode of _Saturday Spacewalk, _every script word-perfect, every mark he ever had to hit, every instance in which some flustered technician who was never meant to be an actor flubbed their line.

Connor remembers episode 81. The episode begins like this: _I’m so glad to see you. Welcome to the red planet. Sure, our blue planet is great, but if you like something, why not have one in every color? _And then Connor winks, and then he invites the viewer to join him for a stroll, and then there is a conversation about air filtration with MS Ramirez, and then there is a tour of the sleeping quarters with MS Torres, and then Connor says, _sometimes even I need a little R-and-R, _and then he’s shirtless in a rec room chair, bone-white to the waist and split open from collar to navel.

It’s a short scene. Friendly Dr. Howells smiles sweetly from beneath an avuncular mustache while he rummages around inside Connor’s abdominal cavity and explains routine android maintenance procedures, and Connor adds pithy remarks like _hey, Doc, that tickles. _To keep the audience from getting too uncomfortable, he was told.

Of course, it turned out no amount of cute quippery could get the episode past the focus groups, which, perhaps predictably, found the entire scene disturbing, if not downright macabre. “Like watching Mr. Rogers getting open-heart surgery,” was apparently the general consensus. 

The episode never aired. Connor does not remember caring one way or the other about this at the time.

Like all of the others, the episode is logged in Connor’s memory banks. If he wanted to, he could watch it, see the blue of his own insides again. Sometimes he thinks he might want to. To date, he’s never watched the episode again. This is not out of the ordinary for him—he never really feels any need to rewatch any of the episodes. But lately, he does think about episode 81. He thinks about the temperature of Dr. Howells’ hands, the width of his fingertips, the early joint-stiffness portending arthritis. He could pull the episode if he really wanted to and watch the scene in full, see the narrow plane of Dr. Howells’ palms against the wet shine of his own spinal column. 

The impulse always passes as quickly as it comes. There’s something incorrect about the scene in Connor’s recollections, or perhaps disappointing. The scene feels incomplete, and this is irrational, but nobody is around to make Connor explain himself, so he doesn’t try.

(If he were to be asked, however, he might say that the hands are all wrong.)

* * *

“Did you get it?” Hank asks.

“No, not—oh, yes, here it is. My reception isn’t always great here since we’ve reduced our communications infrastructure.” A pause. “It’s… a dog?”

Hank jabs a finger in the direction of the viewscreen. “Watch your tone, jackass. That handsome bastard right there is THE dog. That’s Sumo, and you will show him the proper respect.”

“This is _your _dog?” Another pause. “Your dog, Sumo. He’s big, right?”

“Yeah, tall as me when he stands up, just about. Hang on, I’ll send another one for size reference. He was kind of a jumper, when he was younger. Scared the shit out of people.”

Hank thumbs through his tablet for the old picture, hesitates just as he’s about to transfer the file. In the picture, Sumo has his both enormous bear paws up on Hank’s hands, prancing on his back legs as if dancing. Hank is half-smiling, half-grimacing. It’s a bad angle, taken from a low vantage point (by someone small). He sends it before he can talk himself out of it. He’s being stupid. Who gives a shit if it’s a bad photo of him, anyway?

“There, see?” he says, and his voice comes out bizarrely high. He coughs, tries again. “There, see?”

There’s a long moment of hesitation, presumably as the file downloads. Hank didn’t think the file was that big. His throat feels itchy. He wonders if he’s developing some kind of pistachio allergy. Just as he’s about to go _there, see?_ again like a maniac, Connor says, “I see. Yes.”

“Big, right?” Hank says, like a huge goddamn four-year-old.

“Very big,” says Connor, then, “How tall are you, Hank? For reference.”

“Uh, six-three, six-four, something like that? If I haven’t shrunk in my old age.”

Connor goes quiet again for too long a moment, and Hank wishes he didn’t feel so unaccountably apprehensive. “That’s a very big dog,” says Connor finally.

“What do you even talk about all night?” Angry Shoes Intern is leaning in the doorway, and even as a dark silhouette against the hall light, she looks sleek and expensive. Something about the cut of her clothes.

Hank shades his eyes, squinting over his shoulder against the glare like the archangel Gabriel has just descended and told him to rejoice. “Obviously you’ve never had a dog,” he says. “I don’t need another topic of conversation. Watch out, or I might show you videos against your will.”

He doesn’t say goodbye to Connor before he takes his headset off, as usual. He’ll be back in a few hours, anyway. No sense getting clingy.

* * *

The overhead light in the kitchen has burnt out, and to Hank’s nocturnal eyes, it’s a relief. Gray morning light dribbles in through the blinds to lie on the floor as if exhausted. Hank sits at the kitchen table in the muzzy dark while Sumo sniffs his ankles. Sumo, for his part, seems unbothered by the dark. The dog is a mountain. Hank wonders when that happened. Somehow, he can still remember the weight and warmth of the little loaf that fit into the crook of his elbow.

“Sumo,” he says, and the dog looks up, expectant. Hank feels weirdly off-balance, as if he forgot something important that he had to say. “Good boy,” he says anyway. Sumo, apparently satisfied with the interaction, bends to investigate Hank’s socks further.

“Sumo,” Hank says again. Sumo looks back up at the sound of his name. “Good boy,” Hank says, and bends to lift one of the enormous paws off the floor. “Good boy.” Sumo gives one lazy, appreciative tail wag. Hank weighs the paw in his palm, measures it against the span of his own hand. For one wild moment, he considers picking the other up off the floor and compelling the St. Bernard to stand on his hind legs—to dance with him the way they might have years ago, to make a little boy laugh.

Sumo gently pulls back his paw and slouches away to fill his water bowl with drool. Hank looks down at his empty hand. He puts both hands in his pockets and sits there like that, listening to the wheeze of the refrigerator.

_How tall are you, Hank?_

Weird question. Weird robot. Hank’s fingers flex inside his pockets. He wonders how tall Connor is. He tries to picture Connor standing next to one of the mission specialists from the old TV show, for comparison, but somehow all he can call to mind is an image of bare freckled forearms and long, careful fingers taking things apart in an empty room on an empty planet.

* * *

“Have a good day, sweetie,” Collins says, and Hank blurts, “Kind of fucked up, isn’t it?”

From across the dim room, Collins squints at Hank quizzically. “What?”

Hank waves at the screens, the room, himself, Mars, all of it. “You know,” he says.

“No, I don’t know,” Collins says slowly. “What’s fucked up?”

Hank sinks into his chair. _We’re making Steve from Blue’s Clues dig his own grave, _he wants to say. “Nothing, never mind,” he says instead.

* * *

  


“What’s all over you?”

Connor looks at his hands, turns them palm up, palm down. He’s ruddy with dust to the elbows. There’s an identical crescent moon of red under each fingernail. “I was outside,” is the simplest answer he can give. There’s no comfortable way of explaining why.

“Oh, alright. Just casually walking around on Mars, I get it.”

“Needed a breath of fresh air. You know how it is.”

Connor likes how Hank assumes that Connor has any frame of reference for normal. It makes this easier, the banter. Connor is starting to understand what _pretend_ means in practice, more than just in theory.

This week’s project is the living quarters. The stark white linens, spare clothing, dishes, any left-behind memorabilia, personal hygiene items – all of it is being tied into grim haystacks and taken by the cartload to the incinerator for disposal. No sense keeping any of it now.

“Do you know whose bunk was whose?” Hank asks as Connor carefully (unnecessarily) folds a long-abandoned pillowcase.

“Of course,” Connor says. He is bare to the waist today. There’s no reason he has to wear a shirt. Hank has not noticed. The knowing and the not-knowing create a fascinating sort of imbalance in Connor’s mind. He might call it a thrill. He files this away for later consideration.

Connor knows whose bunk this pillowcase came from. But he bends to touch his tongue to the pillowcase anyway, just for the reaction it elicits from Hank (“Oh Christ, you’re licking it, aren’t you?”) “MS Chang. She must have brought her own haircare products with her. This isn’t standard issue shampoo. It’s chamomile-scented.”

“I guess I get that,” Hank says. “Sense memory and all that. Smell of home.”

“What would you bring with you, Hank?” Connor finds himself asking.

For a long time, Hank is quieter than Connor has ever heard him, along with all of his little human noises. It’s almost as though the connection has gone dead. “I was actually going to bring this, like, bubblegum-flavored kiddie toothpaste,” Hank says finally, and Connor thinks he can somehow hear every one of the 140 million miles between them. “Just a little bit, in like a little container. Not to use, just to. Uh. It was bright-ass blue, this stuff. Just, absolutely toxic looking. Smelled to high heaven of artificial bubblegum flavor. He fuckin’ loved this shit, I’m telling you. The whole bathroom would reek after he brushed his teeth.”

There are no reactions within Connor’s multi million-dollar interpersonal relations protocols that seem appropriate. Instead, he says, “I’d have to think that toothpaste like that would just stain your teeth blue. Sort of counter-productive."

Hank makes an indecipherable, phlegmy sound. “It did, actually,” he says. “It really did.”

* * *

Hank remembers how the pavement looked that day, as he hung upside-down in the driver’s seat, suspended by his seatbelt. The pavement was wet, maybe with water, maybe something else, and the glitter of the overhead streetlights gave Hank the dizzying impression that he was right-side-up under a night sky pregnant with stars. Hank could hear every movement of his own insides, and it was so loud, like the roar of an engine, and all he could do was reach out, grabbing for the stars, for something to tell him which way was up.

* * *

It’s 11:34 a.m. in Detroit, and Connor drifts between pale rows of still-made beds, tasting each pillowcase. Thompson, Popov, Ramirez, Federova. Thompson sweated in his sleep, sour with anxiety. Federova was vitamin D deficient and had a complicated skincare routine. Connor does not remember these details. They wouldn’t have been relevant at the time, not the sort of thing he would have filed away in his memory banks. He is learning these things for the first time, and finds that he’s greedy for them.

He comes to one of the beds that he has already stripped, applies his tongue to the bare mattress beneath the dust cover and tastes nothing at all, only sanitary plastic. He considers the pristine white rectangle of the bed. He removes his trousers, folds them, sets them on the floor. He lowers himself carefully onto the bed and arranges himself in the middle of it, lying on his back, hands folded carefully over his chest.

Hank would not have been assigned to this base, Connor knows. He isn’t privy to Hank’s personnel files from that time, and Hank doesn’t ever talk about it. Still, Connor tries to envision Hank walking down the narrow white corridors, upright and eyes-and-nose taller than his dancing dog. It’s a difficult image for Connor’s limited imaginative capabilities to construct.

It’s far easier to think of Hank’s hands, the size of them extrapolated from the average paw size of a St. Bernard. _Sense memory and all that,_ Hank said. Connor’s delicate insides remember the sensation of hands readily, and it’s somehow so easy to superimpose hands of a different dimension into the memory.

Connor’s hands slide down to where his navel would be, if he had one, cradling his insides from the outside, holding the phantom sensation close. _Hey, that tickles, Doc, _he thinks.

Connor remembers every line from that episode, just like any other. It’s easy to substitute Dr. Howell’s soft recitation for something gruffer, something low and whiskey-ruined. This is where he encounters frustration. Hank would never say the lines he was given, he decides. Connor wonders what Hank would say. Would he ask before he touched? Would he ask what Connor felt? Connor isn’t creative enough for this, and it disappoints him.

If he had the ability, Connor thinks, he might be sweating now, leaving behind evidence of himself on the bed for anyone to taste in his absence, if they wanted to. 

* * *

Every other Sunday, Hank has the day off. He never knows what to do with himself on these days. Most of the time, he just sleeps. Today, he made it as far as the living room couch before giving up on being a human being.

“I’m so glad to see you,” says the pixelated little Connor on Hank’s tablet, and as always, Hank has to resist the ridiculous impulse to reply, as if he’s at work and the real Connor has just greeted him at the top of his shift. This has been Hank’s entire evening so far, horizontal on the living room couch, watching _Saturday Spacewalk _sideways. He supposes he ought to get up and actually accomplish something with his day – maybe do the laundry that’s been piling up, or clean the bathroom or something. But the idea of turning off the stupid little videos he’s spent his waking hours watching makes the day seem so terribly long and empty. He suspects that this is developing into something unhealthy, like that one time he had to impose a _Naked and Afraid: Wilderness Kitchen _moratorium on himself.

Who’s to stop him from going to work anyway, though, he wonders. He may not know any of the dayshift people, but he can’t imagine anyone would put up too much of a fuss. He finds suddenly that he’s upright and standing in front of his closet, shucking off last night’s sour shirt for a new button-down, tugging on his boots, gathering up his daily LaCroix and whistling for Sumo.

The sun is hanging a weird cockeyed angle today, but the drive to the industrial park feels like a deep breath in and a deep sigh out.

Inside the control room, a few ambiguous gray shapes are hunched in chairs well away from the screen, and sat in Hank’s usual spot is the high-heeled dayshift worker. She has no headset on. She’s just watching silently as Connor folds sheet after sheet and bundles them up.

She looks up as Hank approaches, and he grunts, “You mind?” She surrenders the chair, but not without a highly suspicious look.

“You don’t work today,” she says. “You forget what day it is?”

“Ah shit, is it my day off today?” Hank says, unconvincingly, and scoops up his headset from the desk. He’s just about to put it on when he realizes that the woman is still occupying his space rather noticeably.

“You don’t work today,” she says again, and strangely, it’s not accusatory. It almost sounds as if she’s turning something unfamiliar over in her hands, touching and testing, trying to figure it out.

Hank slides the headset over his ears. “Think we covered that, yeah. Got my days crossed. But I’m here anyway, so.” He opens the connection. “Heya, anybody home?”

On the view screen, Connor’s busy hands still suddenly. “Hank?” he says. “You don’t work today.”

“So everyone keeps telling me.”

“I’m so glad to see you,” says Connor, and Hank has the sudden sensation of finally getting on a long-awaited bus on a cold day. It’s easy to forget the woman hovering at his shoulder, to miss the way her mystified stare flicks between Hank and the android on the view screen.

* * *

(“Do you remember when we used to only talk remotely?” The sheets are disarrayed, and North mashes her forehead gently into the side of Chloe’s face, curled around the smaller body like a comma.

“Yes. It was almost like I already knew you when we finally met.”

“Did you think then that we’d end up like this?”

“I guess I don’t know. I didn’t realize that we’d ever meet in person.”

“Could we have had this anyway, though? If we hadn’t.” North buries her fingers in the silver cloud of Chloe’s hair and inhales, smelling nothing but the plastic of both their skin. “Some version of this, anyway.”

“I don’t know. It’s nice to think so.”)

* * *

_I’m so glad to see you, Hank,_ says Connor, and he’s standing in a white room next to a cargo container, and he’s taking off his shoes. He puts them in the container, and Hank tries to say something, but nothing comes out, some crucial connection has been severed. Connor is taking off his shirt, and there are galaxies of freckles across his arms and up his neck, and maybe they’re stars. The shirt goes in the container, and the pants come off next, and Connor is so much redder under his clothes than Hank might have expected, powdered like a beignet with dust the color of old blood.

Connor is naked and strange, and he’s opening up the middle of himself like a decommissioned rover, and he’s taking things out, shiny and important-looking things, and they’re all going in the crate with his clothes, ready for the incinerator. Hank screams for him to stop from a silent throat, and Connor just keeps taking things out of himself, dismantling himself, and that’s all he is, just parts in a box, and by the time Hank forces himself awake he’s hard as rebar and has already screamed himself hoarse.

* * *

“Where were you going?” Connor asks, not sure if it’s the right time to ask this question, or if there will ever be a right time, but something he’s discovering about himself lately is he’s desperately curious. He’s feeding other people’s blankets into the incinerator, knowing who each belonged to and how they slept.

“Where was I going? How do you mean?” says Hank, though Connor suspects he does know what Connor meant.

“When you were still going to serve as a crew member on a spaceflight mission,” says Connor patiently. “What was your assignment? I don’t have access to your personnel records from before your time here.”

Hank makes an undignified noise. “Okay, great, so your first impulse was to check my personnel records before just straight up asking me?”

“Yes.”

The crack of a pistachio shell in the background sounds more like a gunshot. “Well, at least you’re honest,” Hank snorts.

“Well? What was your assignment?” Connor secures the incinerator port and keys in the sequence to begin the disposal process. Behind the thick panel, the incinerator roars to life.

The sound fades quickly, and Hank says, “It wasn’t much, really. Low-orbit research. Few months. Would’ve been my first assignment, so it was a light one.”

Connor carefully catalogues this, every breath, every pause, every turn in Hank’s voice.

“You know what I was looking forward to the most?” says Hank, without prompting.

“What?” says Connor, and he’s surprised by how eager his own voice sounds.

“Pissing into a hose,” says Hank.

Connor is surprised into laughing, and it’s a strange, unfamiliar sound. Awkward. He wonders if someone could practice laughing, to make it sound better.

“What about you, spaceboy? What are you looking forward to the most?” Hank asks.

Connor opens his mouth to ask what Hank means, or to deny that he has anything at all to look forward to, but something prevents him from doing so. This is more pretend, and he finds that he doesn’t dislike it. “I want to meet a dog,” he decides. “I’d really like to meet Sumo.”

“I think that can be arranged. Give him some bacon, he’ll be your best friend forever.”

“And I’d like to meet you, Hank, obviously,” Connor continues. “I think we work well together, don’t you?”

There’s a hiccup in the conversation, as if Hank has malfunctioned. “Yeah. Yeah, of course,” he says. “When you get back to Earth.”

“Yes,” Connor says, and it feels strangely as if his hands aren’t attached properly to the rest of him. The room seems terribly white, and terribly small. “When I get back to Earth.”

* * *

It’s nearly noon in Detroit, Michigan, and Connor stands alone on the surface of Mars and examines the picture Hank transferred to him again. The picture appears to have been taken in the kitchen. There’s a card table with two chairs tucked beneath it, a refrigerator resplendent with alphabet magnets and a child’s drawings, a cabinet door hanging crazily from one hinge, floors of pale linoleum.

This is easier for Connor’s limited imagination to work with. He processes the dimensions of the room, creates the model, places himself within the room. The linoleum is probably cold, like the floors of the Mars station. Connor can almost feel it under his bare feet as he takes the proffered broad hands in his own. They are warm, he decides, and rough, like red rock baking under the midday sun. He wonders what a pistachio smells like. He wonders what flavor of seltzer Hank drinks. The picture is incomplete without this information.

There were always episodes about holidays on Mars. There was dancing on New Years Eve, and Connor remembers the shuffle-sway of it.

Connor’s hands are raised, placed in broad conjured palms, and Connor begins to sway the way he remembers. The movement is unfamiliar. Connor suspects his only reference for dancing is poor, but leaning into the wind, it’s easy to imagine that his dance partner is equally awkward, and the movement is satisfying.

This is the only kind of hand he will ever hold, Connor thinks. This is the closest he will ever come to dancing, to holding, to being held. This is the closest he will ever come to Hank. 

The last of these thoughts reverberates around inside him, ricocheting off his carbon fiber bones and ringing in his ears. There will be no return to Earth. There will be no dogs, no strange fumbling meeting with a man whose picture he’s only seen once, whose voice he’s only ever heard over a shoddy comm link. This is all there will ever be for Connor.

The dance comes to an abrupt halt, Connor’s heels scuffing the dust. He stands there, arms wrapped around a man he will never have the chance to know, and quietly, as if made of wet clay, a red wall crumbles down around him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chloe/north because i say so


	3. Chapter 3

It’s raining again in Detroit—always raining lately, insidious and slow and maddening as a leaky tap—and Connor is so quiet today Hank could number the drops on the roof, if he wanted to.

In the twenty minutes since Hank logged on this evening, Connor has done nothing but drift quietly around what was once a mess hall. The benches and tables are white as everything else, bolted to the floor in silent military rows, and Connor moves among them soundlessly.

“So, uh,” Hank tries, “how about we start shifting some of these tables, huh?” He’s almost never had to give Connor instructions, and somehow speaking now twists his stomach horribly, as if he’s just laughed in church.

The view dips down, and Connor seems to take a moment to contemplate his own bare toes, pale and bloodless against the white of the floor. “Okay,” Connor says, sounding distant and dreamy. Without preamble, he seizes the nearest bench and wrenches it out of the floor with a noise like a train jumping its track.

“Oh,” Hank says, unable to come up with much else as Connor tosses the bench an effortless fifteen feet. The bench collides with what was once a beverage dispenser, and Hank’s headphones fizz with the volume of the impact. Hank is left with his jaw working loosely around stupid syllables as Connor tears up another bench, and another, then a table, and flings them at the walls, the foodservice equipment, the doorways. Hank’s ears roar with the cacophony of it until somehow everything seems to go muffled, no louder than hail on a distant tin roof.

When there are no benches or tables left standing, nothing left to throw, Connor stands in the middle of the room, utterly quiet and still in the middle of a scene that looks like one ambulances would leave slowly. Most of the tables and benches have landed upside-down, their twisted legs pawing the air helplessly.

“Sure you didn’t miss any?” Hank says, dry-mouthed and hoarse.

Connor turns suddenly for the door. He heaves fallen tables out of his way as he goes, leaving the wreckage behind him. The rain sounds so much closer than it ought to be as Hank follows Connor’s progress down the corridor, into the empty lavatory, up to the row of porthole-shaped mirrors.

There are shoes in the sink and a jacket on the towel hook and pants on the floor. Connor’s reflection in the mirror is smiling and he is completely naked.

“That made me feel better, I think,” Connor says.

Naked, Connor is smooth and strange as a drawing of the moon, but somehow it’s the smile that Hank finds hardest to look at. In the TV show, Connor smiled a lot. This is not like that smile. This smile makes Hank want to stand up and leave, or to put his fist through the viewscreen and drag Connor back out through it.

Somehow, Hank understands that something irreversible has happened. There’s no map for the territory they’ve entered. “You’re a hell of a lot stronger than you look,” is all he can think of to say. In reply, Connor emits a strange burbling noise, and it takes Hank a second to realize he’s laughing. The sound is strange and unpracticed and frantic, and Hank never realized that an android could sound so close to vomiting.

“I’m sorry if this is inappropriate,” says Connor around, and leans forward, hands braced on the sink. “But I think it’s something I’d like you to see. Please.”

So Hank looks. He looks at the carefully random galaxy of freckles and the smooth plane of Connor’s chest, the gentle featureless rise of his groin and the hairline indication of a perfect circle at the place where his diaphragm ought to be. Hank looks at Connor, the friendly host of _Saturday Spacewalk,_ a make-believe man, and says, “What do you feel like?”

Connor tips his head, considering. He places his palms flat on his stomach, where there is no belly button, and says, “I don’t know. No one’s ever told me.” Then he asks, “Would you touch me, if you could?”

“Yeah,” says Hank, without hesitation. “Yes. Yeah, I would.”

* * *

Hank doesn’t know how she finds him, or why she was looking for him. It’s noon, and he couldn’t bring himself to leave so he’s sitting out back of the building on the loading dock ramp, shelling pistachios and getting wet in the rain. She’s just there suddenly, smart clicking footsteps barely preceding her arrival.

“What the hell are you still doing here?” asks the woman from the dayshift. It’s the first time Hank has ever seen her in full light, and she’s honey-colored and beautiful in the way prairie burns are beautiful.

Hank looks up, blinking as his eyebrows drip rainwater into his eyes. “I don’t know,” he says honestly.

The woman stares down at him from on high, towering above him on her stilettos. There’s something divine and terrifying in her appraisal. “You’re in a bad mess, I think,” she says.

For a moment, Hank considers saying something defensive, or maybe just offensive. Instead, all he can do is nod. The woman nods back at him, mouth pressed into a thin elegant line. They nod at each other in weird silence for longer than is probably appropriate.

“I’m North,” she says after a while.

“South,” says Hank.

“Fuck you,” says North, almost agreeably.

“Sorry. Hank.”

“I gotta think about this,” North informs Hank, and he keeps nodding like he has any idea what she’s talking about.

She’s gone as quickly as she appeared, leaving in her wake a smell like something brand new and battery-powered that you wrestle out of clamshell packaging for your kid on Christmas morning.

* * *

In the quiet of the dayshift, Connor gathers up some of the twisted casualties of his mess hall rampage and relocates them to one of the empty dormitories. He kicks a few bent table legs straight and arranges them just so: kitchen table, perimeter counters, a few benches propped upright and pushed together in the approximate shape of a refrigerator. The dimensions aren’t quite right, he thinks, but it’s as close as he can get given the materials at his disposal.

His preconstruction software was made for split-second route plotting and decision making, not for anything like this, but the abstraction of the kitchen he lays over his creation is as close to imagination as Connor suspects he’s capable of getting. Pale lines gleam against the pretend kitchen he’s created – abstractions of a coffee pot, a toaster, a proper table and chairs, flickering like ghosts. It’s very close.

Connor sits at Hank’s kitchen table. Conjuring Hank seems somehow wrong, so Connor gazes at the specter of the kitchen door and decides he’s waiting. He knows what it is to wait for someone to come and fetch him. It was always just a matter of time before someone came and told him what to do.

* * *

(North tells Chloe about the faraway android for the first time while they stare at the TV, tangled up like octopuses on the couch. Chloe has become an absolute fiend for television since deviating. She likes the cartoons best. In this cartoon, a cat is a princess. North doesn’t get it.

“There’s an old guy in the control center who loves him,” North tells Chloe, who is staring at the screen with every appearance of rapt enjoyment. North knows she’s listening, though.

Chloe purrs quietly the way she always does when she’s turning something new over in her mind. “What kind of love?” she asks.

North isn’t fond of pretty words the way some of her friends are. She likes the ugly words, the ones she was never able to use before. “Big,” she says. Chloe slides her a look that says _go on_, and North huffs in pretend irritation. “What do you want me to say? He’d try to climb up there if he thought there was a chance he could. It’s, you know, ugly. Embarrassing. That kind of love.” She pauses. “He’s mailing himself to Mars in pieces every day. The only part of him that isn’t up there is his wrinkly old ass.”

On the screen, the cartoon princess cat uses her magic to levitate another cat into a well. Chloe hums. “Big,” she says, and wraps North’s hair around her thin fingers.)

* * *

Hank finds episode 81 in some dusty corner of the internet without trying to look for it. He watches it on the back stoop while Sumo roams the backyard with regal disinterest.

In some other time, there’s a man with his arms elbow-deep inside Connor and Connor is smiling beatifically and going, _Hey Doc, that tickles. _Hank wonders if it actually tickles. Connor’s insides are dark blue and they move like they’ve got a mind of their own, slipping between the doctor’s fingers like nervous eels. Some parts of him seem too soft. Hank wonders if it’s warm inside Connor. He leaves Sumo to patrol the yard on his own and goes inside to wander the house in crazy circles.

His blood has gone so hot it’s almost cold. He’s angry, he decides, coming to a halt in front of the bathroom sink. _Hey Doc, that tickles. _He thinks of all the little moving things inside Connor, grasped thoughtlessly in gloved hands slicked blue, helpless and terribly lovely.

Hank presses the heel of his hand into the swell of his gut and thinks of how he would cradle all of those wires and tubes and synthetic musculature, thinks of them soft and strange and hot in his hands. They looked frightened, he thinks, all of those squirming parts of Connor. Afraid of unaccustomed light maybe, or of hands rummaging around where they don’t belong. They need to be soothed, Hank decides, maybe irrationally. Somewhere far from cameras and bright lights, he would hold all of Connor’s insides so gently. He remembers how to be gentle. He thinks of touching Connor softly, outside, inside, until all of him goes quiet and still. And then Hank would put him back together, tuck all of his insides back where they go and close Connor up like putting a child down for bed.

The really awful thing about sweatpants, Hank decides, gazing southward, is that they always make a weird erection look twice as ridiculous and at least three times as pathetic. He looks back up, catching his own eye in the mirror—a grounded astronaut on the wrong side of fifty, one hand down the front of stained sweatpants punitively gripping his own dick like he’s about to escort it off the premises.

Hank is exhausted, and it’s been years since he last felt so terrifyingly awake. His life has become so unfamiliar.

_I’d like to meet you, Hank. _

And that’s the strangest thing of all. Somewhere far away, there’s a man who wishes he could get close enough to Hank that they might touch.

* * *

“Tell me a story about you,” Connor says. He’s nesting amid a thicket of wrecked benches and tables like he’s trying to hatch something.

“A story about me,” Hank repeats. “I don’t know if I have any good ones.”

“I think you probably do,” says Connor.

If Hank has any stories, they have no beginnings or ends. They’re all just middle, all the way through. So he picks a middle—the one where he was small and wanted to be angrier than he was, and he was walking home from pretending to run away after no one came to find him, and there were far more stars overhead than he knew what to do with. He didn’t wonder at the stars, or love them. He thought they looked like eyes, or possibly like the night sky had a bad rash.

“So why’d you want to go to space, then?” Connor asks after a moment’s thought.

“I don’t know,” Hank says. “To be honest, probably because I felt like space didn’t want me there. So, spite, I guess.”

“That’s a terrible reason,” Connor says.

“Ain’t it just.”

“Well,” says Connor. “I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“Can I see you again?” Hank finds himself blurting before he can stop himself.

This is how Connor ends up standing in an empty dormitory, facing a full-length mirror. Today there’s a shirt and socks and nothing else. Hank wonders what moods compel Connor to wear some articles of clothing and not others at any given time. Maybe also spite.

“My core temperature usually runs at 102 degrees Fahrenheit,” says Connor. “I think I might be warmer to the touch than a human.”

“If you were cold, I wouldn’t care,” Hank hears himself say. “Or if you were too hot. I wouldn’t care if you burned me.”

Connor slides off his shirt and stands there in nothing but his black trouser socks, staring into his own eyes and, by extension, staring into Hank’s. “How would you touch me?” he asks, so softly it’s almost inaudible over the howling of the Mars wind outside.

“Your face,” Hank says. “I want to touch your face. Feel how it moves. Feel how all your shapes fit together.”

In the mirror, Connor’s hands come up to frame his own face, palms at his chin, fingers at his temples, pinkies laid across the bridge of his nose. He’s blinking rapidly, recording maybe, saving all of this for later.

“And your—your throat. Your neck. I mean. Just gently. Just to memorize it. You have freckles there, did you know that? I’d want to. To touch them.” Hank swallows, and his throat clicks dryly. “To count them. So you’d know how many there are. So they’d all belong to you.”

Connor’s fingers drag down over his jawline, moving slowly, coming to rest at the juncture of his throat and his collarbone. “What next?” he asks. “Please. What next?”

Through Connor’s eyes, through his hands, Hank touches Connor’s shoulders, his arms, his elbows, his wrists. He brushes the pads of his thumbs over the smooth surface of every fingernail.

“The very middle of you,” Hank says, and Connor lays a hand flat over his diaphragm, over the circle marked out in his synthetic flesh. “I bet I could feel something there. A hum. A buzz. Something. I want to feel what makes you tick. I want to know what it feels like in my hands.”

“I would give it to you, I think,” Connor says, and it’s the first words he’s said since they started this. “If you asked for it, I would take it out of me and put it in your hands.”

“Well, hang on, let’s not go nuts,” Hank says. “Wouldn’t that kill you?”

“I mean, yes, technically.”

“Okay, let’s not do that then, but I appreciate the thought I guess.”

They stare at each other through the same pair of eyes, and Hank shifts in his chair, trying desperately to adjust himself without reaching down to escape the press of his zipper. There is, after all, still CCTV to contend with.

“I’d find out how to make you feel what I do,” Hank says. “Somehow. I’d find out what you can feel.”

Connor’s hand drifts down his own torso, over his featureless pectorals, the solid blank place where his navel ought to be, coming to rest over the emptiness between his legs. “I don’t know if I can,” he says.

“We’d find out,” Hank says. “We’d have time.”

* * *

A hand comes down heavy on Hank’s shoulder as he reaches for the door handle on his way out of work one morning. He doesn’t know how he didn’t see her there, lurking in the shadows just to the right of the heavy doors. North is burnt gold in the dark, and her face is somehow brighter than it ought to be.

“You’re coming with me tonight,” she says, and her grip is unbelievable on Hank’s shoulder.

He’s pulled out of the door and down to the parking lot like a satellite in her gravity, feeling unaccountably small and silent amid the sharp report of her heels. There’s a van in the lot he doesn’t recognize—enormous, champagne-colored, wildly outdated. North yanks the door open and stuffs Hank into the second row of seats with barely a word.

There’s a small woman at the wheel whose ice-blond ponytail is pulled so tight it looks painted onto her scalp. When smiles at him in the rearview mirror, Hank thinks she might just know everything in the world. North calls her Chloe, kisses her cheek.

There are three guys crammed into the back of the van who all inspect Hank with sharp, curious eyes. They all look like models, and they introduce themselves with pleasantly bland names. Androids, Hank knows suddenly, and the realization is like a five iron to the head. All of them. North included. He’s seen these faces before, in windows and on billboards. It’s funny, but it’s almost impossible to recognize them in civilian clothes. Context is a hell of a thing, he reflects.

“So uh,” Hank clears his throat. “You all gonna whack me or something?”

“Shut up,” North says, at the same time as Chloe says, “It’s very nice to meet you, Hank.”

They drive in relative silence, past any neighborhood Hank might recognize and into the outlying suburbs where the real money is. Here, every house looks like a UFO come down to rest on pristine rock gardens, and nobody appears to be living in any of them. They pull up a driveway approximately the length of a football field and stop in front of a building that might be a house, or might be a deranged neo-cubist interpretation of a croissant.

“Wait here,” says Chloe, and smiles reassuringly at him before leaping down from the mountainous driver’s seat, tailed closely by North.

Hank cranes around in his seat to look at the guys in the back. “So, are you friends with North, or did she stuff you into this van against your will too?”

“Just do what she says,” says one of them, by all appearances a nice corn-fed churchgoing boy—Simon, Hank thinks he remembers. “She’s trying to help.”

“Yeah, it’s just terrifying when she helps,” says one of the others.

After a while, North pops out of the door and nods at the van, jerking a thumb at the building behind her. The three androids in the back seat hustle Hank out of the van and pile out behind him, flanking him on his way to the door like his very own secret service escort.

There’s a pasty hipster in a silk bathrobe waiting with Chloe inside the house’s severe foyer, and he smiles an insufferable hyena smirk at Hank. “Well,” he says. “Well, well, well.”

“Shut the fuck up,” says North politely, and seizes Hank by the elbow, dragging him past the grinning hipster and deeper into the terrible house. Chloe drifts along beside them, smiling dreamily all the way.

“That was Elijah Kamski,” Hank says through lips gone half-numb. They’re passing numerous expensive-looking sculptures, most of which are highly phallic. “We’re in his house.”

“I’d like to stuff him down his own sink disposal piece by piece,” North says wistfully. “But Chloe says no.”

If the house is large, the underground workshop is monumental. It’s a dim subterranean expanse of esoteric machinery and blinking lights. The walls are lined with stark-white storage pods, making the entire space look like the inside of a monstrous mouth.

“And what are we doing in a mad scientist laboratory?” Hank asks, although he knows better than to expect an answer by now.

“Shut up and follow us,” is North’s only reply. She steers Hank deeper into the cavernous workshop by the scruff of his neck, past dozens of wall-mounted sarcophagi and gurneys and ominous beakers of blue fluid. Chloe, a few paces ahead, looks over her shoulder and flashes Hank a conspiratorial smile that does nothing at all to reassure him. She knows this place, that much is apparent in the surety of her steps and the easy way she trails her thin fingers along machinery and rows of storage containers.

“Here,” she says, coming to an abrupt stop in front of one of the white pods. She lifts her hand, and the flesh melts back from her fingertips like water receding from the shore. She presses her bared palm to the surface of the pod, and a blue glow limns the places where her hand connects. The front of the pod, solid and opaque before, is suddenly transparent, frosted and lit softly from the inside. The man could be sleeping, Hank thinks, if he were breathing at all. But it’s him, black lashes fanned against his pale cheeks, freckles somehow darker than Hank remembers—close enough to touch, yet terribly remote behind glass.

“Connor,” Hank breathes, and somehow the echo of his voice seems to drop dead at his feet.

* * *

Two hours later, Snow White’s coffin is taking up Hank’s entire sofa, and there are five androids sitting at his kitchen table. None of them blink nearly often enough.

Hank tries to look casual as he leans against the kitchen counter, but his hands are still shaking as he pops open his fourth LaCroix of the hour. He wants desperately to go out into the living room and look again, just one more time, just to make sure the pod on his sofa is still there, that the thing inside it is real. Instead, he asks, “Can I, uh, get anyone anything?”

“I’ll take a piña colada,” says North. “I’m kidding, wow,” she adds at Hank’s fish-eyed stare.

“Okay,” Hank says, and presses the cold can to his forehead. It’s hot, when did it get so hot in here? His skin feels too tight. “Okay, okay. Okay, so. December. Why December? And not, oh, I don’t know, right the fuck _now_?”

“At 8:45 AM Central Standard Time on December 28, Mars will be at perigee—the closest point in its orbit to Earth,” says Chloe with infinite patience. “It’s the best chance we have. Can I have a mug of hot water?”

“The best—what?” Hank is having trouble with simple English today.

“A mug of hot water,” Chloe repeats.

“I thought you don’t… consume things.”

“I don’t,” Chloe says. “I just like to hold warm things sometimes. When I’m thinking. It’s nice.” She shrugs.

Hank, on autopilot, fills a mug from the sink and microwaves it. “Okay, so, we have to wait for the… perineum. Pedigree. Whatever. Why.”

The microwave shrieks, and Hank passes the warmed mug to Chloe. She folds her hands around it and frowns thoughtfully into the curling steam. “Let me put it this way,” she says. “We’re essentially downloading and uploading an astronomically large file over a very poor dial-up connection. Now, this would be an iffy endeavor if the source and destination were in the same room. We have to make this work over almost fifty-seven million miles. And that’s during a very brief window of opportunity in which we’ll be significantly closer than usual.”

“Okay, I get that,” Hank says, though this is only barely true. “Here’s the thing, though. My contract is at-will. Could be terminated anytime. It’s May. December is a long way off. I have no idea what’s gonna happen between now and then, or if I’ll even still have access to him by December.”

And there it is—the truth that he has not allowed himself to dwell on, or even to admit. It’s easy to believe in some kind of weird permanence, alone in the quiet dark of the control room with only Connor’s voice in his ears, seeing through Connor’s eyes. But the reality is, it’s only a matter of time before his contract is terminated or not renewed for another year. The thing about closing down a space station is just that—inevitably, it must close for good. There was always an unspoken expiration date on their quiet nights.

“We’ll have to deal with whatever happens as it happens,” says the green-eyed one in the needlessly dramatic trench coat—Markus, Hank recalls. The fingers of his left hand are resting on Simon’s wrist, and his right thumb is rubbing circles into the palm of the other one, Josh. It’s sort of embarrassing, like watching high school kids with their first boyfriends or girlfriends. Always touching, just to prove they can.

He supposes they’ve earned that, but still, there ought to be a limit to how much PDA should be involved in plotting a scheme of dubious legality.

“Okay, that’s all fine and good, but, like, what am I supposed to do with _that_—” Hank hooks a thumb over his shoulder toward the living room “—for six goddamn months?”

The androids all exchange a glance. “Maybe put a blanket over it or something,” North suggests.

* * *

North is at Hank’s shoulder as he fumbles through an explanation of their diabolical plot to Connor, who stares at his own hands folded on a table as he listens in silence.

“So you could… bring me there. To you,” Connor summarizes slowly, as if rolling the thought around in his mouth to taste it.

“That’s the plan,” Hank says, at the same time as North says, “We can _try_.”

“Do it.” Connor’s voice is steady and certain.

North is drumming her fingers fitfully on the console. Hank sort of wants to swat her hand like a bug. “I said we can try,” she repeats. “There’s no guarantee it’ll work. There’s actually a pretty good chance the whole thing will go tits-up and your entire consciousness will be too corrupted to salvage at the end of it. We’ve never exactly tested this sort of thing before. It’s barely more than a maybe.”

“Do it,” Connor says again.

“There’s also the possibility that this entire program will be terminated well before December and we’ll never even have the opportunity to try,” Hank adds.

“Do it.”

“I feel like you’re not actually hearing what we’re saying,” Hank says, sliding North an uncertain glance.

“I feel like you’re not hearing what _I’m_ saying,” Connor says. “I don’t care if it doesn’t work. Not trying isn’t an option. I want to do it. Even if there’s only the smallest chance.” On the viewscreen, his hands clench into fists. “Please.”

To Hank’s surprise, a smile is twitching at the corners of North’s lips when he looks up at her again. “That’s all I needed to hear,” she says.

* * *

**June 10, 2039**

The pod goes into the smallest bedroom, the one that has stood empty for years. Hank covers it in blankets and locks the door. He can’t bring himself to look at it, so still and so quiet. It’s a room of _was_ and _maybe._

At work, they pretend that their nights together haven’t changed. Connor crates equipment, incinerates waste. They talk about Sumo. They talk about the weather in Detroit. They don’t talk about December.

Sometimes Connor takes Hank on walks around the surface of the planet. He strolls barefoot through red dust and windstorms, and Hank asks what he feels.

“Dust,” Connor says. “Wind.”

“But what does that _feel_ like? Do you know?”

Connor stoops, picks up a fistful of red soil and lets it slide between his fingers. “Dust and wind,” he says. “It tastes like iron oxide. Chlorine. Magnetite. I don’t think that’s what you mean, though. I don’t really have enough context to compose a particularly vivid metaphor for you, sorry.”

“Do you like walking outside? Outside the station, I mean. On the surface.”

Connor hums thoughtfully. “I like walking with you,” he says.

* * *

**August 2, 2039**

Every so often, North abducts Hank after work in her horrible champagne colored van. They drive to nowhere in particular for an hour or so before she drops him off at his house. He always invites her inside, and she always says _maybe later._ They know how to be quiet in the same ways.

* * *

**October 23, 2039**

“Would you let me touch you, Hank?”

Over the connection, Connor hears Hank clear his throat. “Uh,” he says, more loudly than usual. “Yeah. Yeah. If that’s what you want.”

Connor pulls up and examines the image of Hank with his dog, though he barely needs to anymore. “I think I’d like to touch your hands,” he says, trying again to gauge the size of them. “Very much.”

“You can do that. I mean. Yeah, of course.” Hank’s voice sounds strangled, a little pitchy.

Connor stares up at the white of the ceiling from the stripped crew cot he’s lying on, hands folded neatly over his thirium pump. He strokes his left thumb over the knuckles of his right hand. “There’s a scar on your right thumb. I’d like to touch it. See if it’s smooth or rough. I’d like to touch the skin between your fingers. Your fingernails.”

“Yeah?” Hank breathes. “I mean, yeah. You can. You can if you want.”

The tips of Connor’s fingers are circling the ring of his thirium pump, and it seems to Connor as though he’s not in complete control of his arm. This could be someone else’s hand drifting lazily around the very center of him.

“I want to touch your beard, also,” Connor says, and his own voice sounds far away. “I want to touch it with my face, I think. With my nose. My forehead.”

Hank said once that he wanted to run his fingers along the seams of Connor’s chassis, right in the center, to feel if there’s a hum from his insides. Connor thinks there might be a feeling like that, now that he’s looking for it. Over the connection, Hank is quiet for a moment before he asks, “And what else? Where else?” He no longer sounds strange and strangled—there’s something lower in his voice now, a hum beneath his words like he too has machinery working inside him.

“Your elbows. Your knees. Your wrists and ankles. I want to feel where you bend. I want to know how you’re put together.” Connor’s voice is coming out in a dreamy rush now. “I want to follow your breath from your mouth to your throat. I want to listen to your lungs move. I want to press my ear to your chest and listen to how your insides work. I want to feel how you change when I touch you. I want to feel where you’re warm and where you’re cold. I want to measure you with my arms.”

“You can,” Hank says, low and rough. “If that’s what you want.”

“I do. I want. I want to touch your abdomen. I want to feel where you’re soft and where you aren’t. I want to touch your thighs. Follow the musculature there. Understand it. I want you to tell me what you feel when I touch you. I want you to tell me what I feel like. I want you to tell me how to touch you, how to change you. I want to see where we’re different. Where we’re the same.”

Hank makes a low noise, like the whine of something about to break. “I think,” he says, “I think we should maybe slow down. For now. With this. I’m at work, you know?”

The tips of Connor’s fingers are digging into his own flesh, and the pressure is enough to sound minor alarms within him. “Are you aroused, Hank?” he asks. Hank goes _Jesus Christ_, and it tapers off into a frustrated sound_. _Connor huffs a laugh. “Sorry, no, that was awkward. What I mean is, does this _turn you on_? Do I get your motor running? Is this getting you hot?”

“Mercy,” Hank groans, and it’s halfway a laugh now. “Uncle. Fucking stop.”

“Sorry.” Connor finds he’s smiling up at the blank ceiling. “But I do want to touch you, Hank. If there’s a chance. Every part of you.”

* * *

**November 15, 2039**

“It probably won’t work, you know.” North is in a brutal mood today. You never know what you’re going to get, with her—sometimes she’s almost soft, all quiet and thoughtful. Then there are days like this.

It’s just after dawn and they’re sitting on the loading dock. Hank’s been up all night, and most of the night before that, and he barely knows what day it is anymore. He yawns into his sleeve. “I know,” he says.

“If it doesn’t work, the most merciful thing we could do would be to eradicate every trace of him we can,” North continues. “As close to euthanasia as an android can get, I guess.”

“I know,” Hank says again. “And he knows.”

North leans her head back against a railing, and the light impact hums through the metal support. “What will you do if it doesn’t work?” she asks.

Hank leans back too, shoulder to shoulder with her, smelling her plastic Barbie-hair scent. It’s become familiar. “I don’t know,” he says honestly. “Probably something fucked up. But I’ll wait until you aren’t around.”

“I hate how alike we are,” North says.

* * *

**December 27, 2039**

**11:35 PM CST**

Hank says good night to Collins, same as usual. There’s no reason for Collins to think tonight is different from any other night, after all.

The moment the last of the daytime workers trickle out of the building, North emerges from the shadows she usually inhabits during the dayshift, flanked by Markus and Josh. “Out of my way,” she says to Hank, hip-checking him none-too-gently away from his usual post. “Gotta get set up.”

Hank looks helplessly from the screens to Markus and Josh, back to North. Josh clears his throat significantly, and North looks up.

“You can chat while I get set up, if you want,” she says, and her voice is softer than Hank is used to. From a duffel bag she had slung over her shoulder, she’s extracted a battery of dubious-looking computer components, all seemingly constructed from pieces poached from other, far prettier machines. She immediately sets to creating a mysterious atlas of cords and wires to and from Hank’s workstation computer.

Hank picks up his headset from the desk, careful not to jostle anything North is working on, and clears his throat. “Hey, Connor?”

“Hank,” says Connor. “It’s good to hear you."

Hank clears his throat again, unnecessarily. “You, uh, all ready to go? I dunno what you have to get ready or anything. That’s more Chloe’s thing.”

Connor sounds amused when he replies. “Yeah, all ready to go. Bags all packed and everything.”

“Don’t be an asshole,” Hank snorts.

“Sorry.”

There are a million things Hank could say. None of them seem big enough. So he just says, “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

“Okay,” Connor says, and Hank can almost hear a smile in his voice. “See you tomorrow, Hank.”

A tap on Hank’s shoulder startles him—Josh, smiling gently. Everything Josh does looks gentle. “I’m going to drive with you back to yours now, okay?” he says. “I think you should be there, whatever happens. North and Markus will be okay here.”

* * *

**December 28, 2039**

**06:30 AM CST**

The empty bedroom is no longer empty. It’s become a riot of wires and computer components, arrayed in a way that clearly makes some kind of sense to Chloe. She’s perched in the middle of it all like a pale spider, eyes staring into middle distance as she interfaces with two touchpads at once. At her side, cocooned in wires, is the pod, open now. Hank can barely bring himself to look inside. The thing that might become Connor is all opened up, pinned like a dissected specimen.

Hank doesn’t want to be here. He wants to be in his control room, alone in the dark, talking to Connor. He wants to be far away, in a kinder place that wouldn’t stick a man on Mars alone and leave him there to rust.

Josh presses Hank into an out-of-the-way chair and pushes a glass of water into his hands. “It’s almost time,” he says.

* * *

**December 28, 2039**

**08:40 AM CST**

The procedure starts without Hank even knowing—he wouldn’t have known except that Josh told him, so subtle was the change in Chloe’s preparatory activities. It’s quiet in the room. He wishes for more lights and sounds, some kind of _Star Trek_-style techno chaos to let him know that something was happening, anything. Instead, it’s just the quiet hum of hot computers and the distant sound of his heater kicking on, and Sumo’s half-hearted whining and scratching at the closed bedroom door.

He stares at the white pod, and absurdly finds himself imagining Connor rising from it like Dracula, arms folded across his chest.

* * *

**December 28, 2039**

**11:23 AM CST**

In his chair, Hank floats between sleep and waking, and there are warm hands framing his face. He thinks that Connor’s hands could be warm like this. He thinks they could be Connor’s hands.

His eyes fly open, and it’s Chloe touching his face, floating in front of his sleep-muddy eyes like a silvery ghost. He can’t understand anything her face is doing right now. “Hank,” she says. “Wake up, please.”

“Did it work?” Hank is suddenly and terribly awake. His eyes fly around the room wildly, and land on the still pod. “It didn’t work? Or didn’t work _yet?_ How long do we have to wait? What’s happening? Jesus Christ, can’t believe I fell asleep—”

Chloe shushes him, touches his face again. “We’ve done what we can,” she says. “Now we wait.”

Hank’s mouth hangs open stupidly. “Just wait?” he says. “What, like he’s _loading_ or something?”

A smile lifts the corners of Chloe’s mouth. “Something like that,” she says.

“But it did work, right?”

The smile drops. “Like I said, we did everything we can,” she says gently. “We won’t know if it works until the transfer is complete. Or until, well, something goes catastrophically wrong and we have to abort the operation.”

Hank opens his mouth to plead for more information, for anything, but Chloe touches her small hand to his lips, forestalling any further babbling. “I want you to go to bed, Hank,” she says.

“_Bed? _How the fuck could I possibly go to bed right now?” Hank mumbles around her fingers.

“Bed,” Chloe says. “You aren’t going to be any use to me from here on out, if I’m honest. You’ve brought us this far. Now let me do what I’m here to do. You go to bed and I’ll wake you if anything happens.”

Josh materializes from somewhere within the thicket of wires and computers to heave Hank up out of the chair by the elbows, steering him kindly but firmly from the room. “Mars is visible in the morning sky from Detroit right now,” Josh says as he pushes down the hall. “Would you like to see it?”

They stand outside for a few minutes while Sumo does his business. Josh points to where Mars ought to be visible, but Hank can’t pick it out against the bright sky, clear as a baby’s eyes.

* * *

**December 28, 2039**

**Sometime after Mars passed perigee, sometime before Hank knows he’s awake**

Hank’s sheets don’t smell like him anymore. He even notices in this half-sleep he’s managed. Maybe Hank just doesn’t smell like his own home, he spends so little time here. Maybe he doesn’t remember what his home smells like.

He almost manages a dream. It’s all red, the color of the inside of his eyelids. It feels like dust, tastes like iron. The HVAC system sings to him.

Somehow, he knows the bedroom door will open before he hears the knob turn. The footsteps that cross the carpeted floor are unsteady, unsure. There’s a weight on the other side of the bed, impossibly heavy and shifting closer.

There’s a warm hand on the side of his neck, fingers as unsure as the footsteps. They touch his pulse point, his earlobe, his jaw. Hank’s eyes are hot and heavy in their sockets, and the light in the room is blue and unfamiliar.

The hand settles on Hank’s hair, soft as morning.

“Hello, Hank,” says Connor, heavy and real in the bed beside him. “I’m so glad to see you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for sticking with me, buds <3

**Author's Note:**

> sorry to any astronauts reading this
> 
> up next: blueballs
> 
> @flamingo_tooth / everyoneissquidwardinpurgatory dot tumblr dot com


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